Why do you find Tony Rook a mini-dictator? I haven't listened much, but he
struck me as a bit of a schmuck.

"Flobby Bischer" wrote in message
. ..

I vowed never to pay for chess site and now I subscribe to ICC.

Here's what I found:
Benefits
1.) not many players on fics tons on icc
2.) interface on icc is a bit easier than fics
3.) 24/7 help for questions, I recall on fics asking questions that were
never answered.
4.) lots of titled players on icc, and i like watching them.
5.) icc covers many events and it's easy to click and watch.
6.) some nice libraries of historical games, i don't know if these are
available to guest
7.) the ability to make a few acquaintances
8.) a couple learning clubs exist stuch as an unusual opening group or the
lechess club offering free analysis
9.) good automatic history of games and a library to save games in for
future reference
10.) very rarely down and back up servers often when the main site goes
down
11.) good process of dealing with quitters who adjourn or quit a rated
game
12.) a pretty decent, apparently, method of tracking and punishing those
annoying computer users

Drawbacks
1.) still a mess of typed commands that could be much more user friendly
2.) a stalled lecturebot program, evidently nobody is available to either
write or edit new lectures so a few just repeat and repeat and repeat
3.) lots of nasty guests
4.) some admins are a bit egotistical and power hungry
5.) their link with chess.fm is odd and nepotistic, run by a weird mini
dictator using the alias tony rook

So overall I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. I would like to
see
FICS work better, be more user friendly and get the traffic that ICC gets
because I ultimately would like it to all be free. But it's not and having
joined ICC over two years ago, I don't regreat a moment of it. I did it
because I wanted to play. The sites I don't recommend are WCN or USCF,
not
many players in either one and there are just more options on ICC.



"Chiaromondo" wrote in message
...
You can try it for free, and after that if you play much it's worth
paying
that small amount if one gets opponents faster.